<p>SURVEY: Spring 2008 (High School experience with history classes, positive or negative learning experience? How much reading per week? What kind of exams? How much writing? Etc.)</p><p>1) I had coaches for teachers and they could have cared less about teaching. It was negative because I never really learned anything, so I’m ready to learn now… 10 pages per week [was assigned] but it was never really enforced. 2) It was pretty fun, the football coach was the teacher and we got along. It was a positive experience. We had presentations, tests. Just about everything. They assigned a lot of pages, but I rarely read them. 3) It was definitely a negative experience very typical to most others, I believe all were coaches who could truly care less. 4) My 9th grade history teacher was a football coach and that was a damn joke. I can’t think of any papers that wrote for history. (negative experiences). 5) Mostly negative, I had a high school baseball coach as the teacher so we mostly spent our time either watching videos, in groups doing projects, or just plain bullshitting about things that had nothing to do with our history topic. Less than 10 [pages of reading assigned]. Multiple choice. Rarely ever studied, didn’t need to. Hardly any writing, mostly just projects and then multiple-choice exams. 6) I can’t recall much that I’ve learned in high school so I’d have to say that it was a negative learning experience. My teacher was the track coach and that’s often what we discussed in class. We didn’t have much writing… 7) History in my high school was a negative learning experience because it was all done by coaches and their objective was less to make sure we learned but more so to make sure we got good grades. We read a maximum of ten pages per week. We generally had short worksheets if we had any type of homework for class. 8) We never got reading assignments, just took notes in class and got assignments everyday. Some answers found in notes, some in the book… I usually studied the night before with the study guide that the teacher had prepared for us. 9) To be honest, I really don’t remember my history experience in high school. I have always studied with note cards. I don’t remember doing a lot of writing. 10) It was not a positive learning experience because the teacher played videos half or more of the time. It was fun and easy, but the amount learned was very minimal. An estimation would be an average of five or less pages a week. They were dominantly multiple choice with any others being fill-in- the-blank or matching. We prepared with a ready made study guide that was fairly precise. If memory serves me, there were no writing assignments or research papers at all… They were very simple assignments that took no longer than twenty minutes. 11) I love history… But I hated it in high school. I took world history and U.S. history and the teachers didn’t seem to care if we learned the material or not. It was all multiple choice and I hated that because it was never over a lot of stuff we were taught. To study we just read over the chapters and sometimes had a study guide. I did very little writeing in my history classes. 12) I enjoy history for the most part. One class all we did was watch movies and then have tests, it got old and we really didn’t learn too much… Mainly multiple choice tests, but one class was all essay which was nice. 13) It was neither really. Most of my teachers made it fun but I didn’t retain any of the information that they taught me. Seemed like a lot of reading. About 20 pages per week. I read over my notes and skimmed over my textbooks a few days before. I didn’t do a lot of writing except for taking my own notes. And I don’t remember ever having a research paper… 14) I would say my high school experience w/ history was simply memorization by using flashcards. To be 100% honest, I can’t recall any of it, though I do remember thinking at the time that it was a positive experience because it was easy and my teacher was funny. 15) I didn’t study very much at all in high school. It was a negative experience. I didn’t know how to study. 16) I don’t remember anything from high school history. I remember more from elementary and middle school. Our teacher was new, fresh out of college, didn’t know was he was doing. The only writing we did was note taking from an overhead & we had to answer the chapter questions out of the textbook. 17) It was easy. I guess it’d be considered negative, due to how easy it was. Most of it [reading] was in class, so very little at home. Multiple choice or fill in the blank. We had study guides that gave us the answers. 18) I probably read 10 pages a week when I was in history. I took mostly scantron and fill in the blanks. Usually we were given study guides to fill in. There was never a research paper in any of my history classes, but I did always have essay questions, maybe one or two per test. 19) I had a teacher who lectured in monotone and I remember very little. 3-5 pages [per week assigned]. Multiple choice [tests] I looked over worksheets for 10 minutes before class. None [writing]. The only assignments were fill-in-the-blank worksheets. 20) [the teacher] mainly just had us take notes every class so we just wrote and didn’t learn it. We did some reading in class, but he didn’t assign reading. Mainly multiple choice and matching with one essay question. I usually just memorized vocab & dates of events. 21) We didn’t do a lot of writing in my classes, our assignments were fill in the blank, and we didn’t have essays, but we did have research papers. 22) Teacher made history pretty fun, it didn’t bother me too much. 2-5 pages [per week assigned reading] 23) My experience is little, and it was always note taking while being lectured. I saw that to some this was a positive learning experience, however I can’t remember a thing from these classes, no dates, no places, I ashamedly rely on Google for my inquiries to our past. Honestly, I probably had 5 pages per week at the most. Mostly [exams] were matching with m.c. I do recall one exam that had one essay after many m. c. questions. I studied with a partner as we were given 2 lists of possible questions that could be on the exam. No research assignments. 24) The experiences I have had with history don’t include studying. The negative experiences with it has given me a fear of studying for it. At times I feel I don’t know what to study or that I am studying the wrong information for the test. The number of pages the class would read together all week was about 20. The number of pages I would read on my own was zero. 25) It was more of a negative experience. My study skills in general were not up to par. In my history classes, I was a “crammer” and I got frustrated when I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t doing well in class. I really didn’t read that much… 26) I have little knowledge of history. My teachers went over the content and then I would take a standardized test. The experience was neither positive nor negative. It was just another class that I took during those years. I didn’t do a lot of reading during high school history classes. I was supposed to, but I didn’t. I would take the standard tests throughout high school. I really didn’t prepare at all for my history exams. I barely did any sort of writing for my history exams… 27) My experience studying history in high school was a mixture of positive and negative. One instructor required a B to pass the class (negative). One instructor had us do a team project collecting articles out of daily newspapers that applied to the amendment (positive). I can’t honestly remember [reading assigned] but it I would estimate low. I had very little writing and I can’t remember any specific essays… 28) My experience with history throughout my education has been very poor. My education in history courses was very negative. The quality of the lessons taught was not high. In class we probably read 5-10 pages as a class. Majority of class was spent watching CNN. In high school out test were mostly multiple choice, true/false, and fill in the blank. Most of the time we were given study guides to prepare. I did little or no writing in my high school history class. 29) I took several history courses in high school, the most recent being World Wars and British Literature. Basically, these classes were negative learning experiences, primarily because the football coaches taught them. One gave up regular testing in favor of having discussions with the star football players. 30) My history classes were a negative experience. The classes I took were always multiple choice and an essay. It never mattered what was in the essay as long as it was a paragraph or more. I wanted a greater challenge. There weren’t really any actual writing assignments. 31) I learned just enough to pass the class and the teachers taught us everything. We didn’t even need to open the assigned book. I didn’t have to read at all except my notes for studying. We had a combination of essay, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank. They were too easy and I studied for them over night. 32) Negative. Teachers were multiple choice test givers. Gave all the notes in class. No homework or writing assignments. 0 [pages reading assigned per week] [Tests were] multiple choice. I didn’t need to study as they were open notes. None. No research paper. No homework normally. All work was done in class. 33) We had very few reading assignments assigned in our history classes… I often crammed for all my tests. My high school history class was always one paper per semester. The paper only had to be two pages in length. We did not have a research paper or essays. 34) My teacher did a really good job of explaining it, but we didn’t have to do much ourselves. Every test was multiple choice with maybe two short answer questions. I think it was a negative experience because I didn’t get much out of it… We didn’t read much, he just lectured. All of my exams were Scantron. I would study by doing the study guide he gave us. It told us every answer on the test. We didn’t do much writing. All we had to do was listen to him. He would give us the notes… We had no essays. 35) Studying history in high school wasn’t to difficult we didn’t go into much depth…In high school we had a lot of scantron and short answer type questions. 36) History in high school was dates and names. Rarely any explanation or interpretation of the info. None [reading assigned]. Multiple choice and I studied by doing the study guides given to us. Rarely any essays, no research paper that I remember and most assignments were done in groups in class. 37) There weren’t any big assignments of pages, it was more a read if you wish basis. I crammed. 38) Multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching. I studied by reviewing the notes I took. Very little [writing] I had a couple of research papers but I can’t recall ever answering an essay question in history. 39) I did barely any history during high school. Most of my learning came from library or the discovery/history channel. It was enjoyable but unfulfilling. We didn’t have any tests. 40) I have never enjoyed the subject of history. It is a difficult subject for me to understand, but I was always able to pass the classes. 41) It was a negative learning experience because I didn’t learn anything. I just wrote down what was on the board and it was multiple choice so I just guessed. 42) I had a negative learning experience in high school. We usually watched movies and listened to the teacher talk. I probably read maybe 5 or 6 pages a week. We had multiple choice exams and our teacher gave us a study guide the day before a test. 43) History in my school was a joke. Our teacher was old, unknowledgeable, and the class seemed like social hour. It was easy, but not a positive experience. I feel my education was shorted, and luckily changes were made at my H. S. Not much reading at all… maybe 10-15 pages per week. 44) My experience tends to be multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, regurgitation for a test then flush of any uninteresting elements. I regard the learning in a rather neutral fashion; usefull for school, interesting at points, less than important overall. 10-15 pages were read per day during high school. Multiple choice, fill in the blank, and short answer comprised my high school tests. I would study via reading for an hour or so a day and three heavy “cram” nights before the test. Not a single piece of writing past 3-5 sentence short answers. 45) It was mostly redundant. We usually learned about the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement… every year, year after year. I acquired most of my historical knowledge from movies, my parents, books and other random places. 46) My experiences were different based on the class. U. S. History and World History were taught by two different teachers. Both involved a lot of note taking but U. S. History was a bit better than World History. The World History teacher tended to try and cram the whole book into us while the U. S. History just gave us the most important stuff. 47) I did no reading for history class in high school; we were taught by lecture. 48) I enjoyed my experience with history in high school. While I did like it I would call it neither positive or negative. I often found it unchallenging and would have to get books from the library to expand upon what I was learning. We had scanned bubble sheets and short answers. We didn’t have a lot of writing assignments in high school, mostly worksheets from the book. We had one small research paper a year and we did not have essays. 49) There wasn’t much learning going on. We didn’t do very much in the class so I would have to describe it as a negative learning experience. We would probably do at most 8 pages a week. [Exams] were all multiple choice. I just read over the chapters and highlighted and wrote down bold words and things on study guide. We did very little writing in my high school history class. 50) Umm…I enjoyed this course [?] but I didn’t like my teacher so it made it hard to learn…multiple choice/fill in the blank [tests] Not a lot [of writing] 51) Genaral high school ed it was positive I learn a little most was required. 10 pages [assigned per week]. Multiple choice. Cram right before. 52) I would say my experience with studying history in high school was pretty neutral. There really aren’t any specific memories that come to mind.</p>